Amazon on Monday morning unveiled Go, what it's calling "the world's most advanced shopping technology."
Here's how it works: Just head to the Amazon Go store (at this point, Amazon has announced one location in Seattle), open the corresponding app, and scan your phone on the way in. From there, you can stow away your phone and grab all the items you need. When you're finished collecting your items, just walk out of the store. No more lines or registers.
In development for the past four years, the new system leverages "the most advanced" machine learning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence technology, Amazon says in the video below. Anything you pick up off store shelves is automatically added to a virtual cart. If you put the item back on the shelf, it will be removed from your cart.
When you exit the store, Amazon's "just walk out" technology adds up everything in your virtual cart, charges your Amazon account, and sends a receipt to the app.
"Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning," Amazon said in a FAQ page. The technology automatically detects when you take an item off the shelf, and keeps track of it in your virtual cart.
Amazon Go is expected to launch in early 2017 in Seattle. The 1,800 square-foot store will be located at 2131 7th Ave., and offer prepared breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack items plus a selection of "grocery essentials" and meal kits. If you're interested, you can sign up here to be notified when the store opens.
For more, see what PCMag's Sascha Segan and Max Eddy have to say about the announcement in today's episode of Random Access, embedded below.
Random Access: We're trying out Oculus Touch and talking about Apple Car, Samsung batteries, and Amazon's new grocery store.
Posted by PCMag on Monday, December 5, 2016